Max Fraser: Down and Out in the New Middletowns

Max Fraser is a journalist and doctoral student in American history.

“When I graduated from Muncie Central High School, you could go just about anyplace and get a job—a decent job,” says Dennis Tyler. Tyler has represented Muncie’s Delaware County in the Indiana State House since 2007, and this past November he became the first Democratic mayor of Muncie in two decades. Before embarking on a political career, Tyler, who is sixty-nine, spent more than forty years in the fire department. For most of that time, he worked out of a firehouse just a mile and a half from where he grew up on Muncie’s Southside. “You could go to Borg Warner, and if you didn’t like Borg Warner you could leave and go to Chevrolet; if you didn’t like Chevrolet you could leave and go to Delco; if you didn’t like Delco you could leave and go to Acme-Lee, or dozens and dozens of other little places that were spinning off mom-and-pop tool-and-die shops.”

“At one point,” he recalls proudly, “the Southside of Muncie was almost completely built by people working in them factories.” Working people may have built south Muncie, but it was a pair of sociologists that put the city on the map. Ever since Robert and Helen Lynd christened Muncie Middletown in 1929, journalists, academics, and presidential hopefuls have flocked to this blue-collar city in eastern Indiana, for a look into the petri dish of American life or simply some Joe-the-Plumber-style street cred.

Last summer, with the nattering of congressional debt-ceiling debates and reports of ballooning corporate profits making headlines, I went in search of what Middletown has become today. Once as wholesome a symbol of the American Dream as the family breadwinner and apple pie, the very idea of Middletown now seemed a pale shadow of present realities, as the stark prose of unemployment statistics and eviction notices inscribed a very different kind of story onto the lives of millions of Americans....